Children's geographies

Context

Children's geographies is the branch of human geography and childhood studies dealing with the study of places and spaces of children's lives, characterised experientially, politically and ethically.

Ever since the cultural turn in geography, there has been recognition that society is not homogeneous but heterogeneous. It is characterised by diversity, differences and subjectivities. While feminist geographers were able to strengthen the need for examination of gender, class and race as issues affecting women, 'children' as an umbrella term that encompasses children, teenagers, youths and young people is still relatively missing a 'frame of reference' in the complexities of 'geographies'. In the act of theorising about children and their geographies, the ways of doing research and the assumed ontological realities often frame children and adults in ways that impose a binary, hierarchical and developmental model. This reproduces and enforces the hegemony of adult-centred discourses of children within knowledge production.

Development of children's geographies as a field

Children's geographies has developed in academic human geography since the beginning of the 1990s, although there were notable studies in the area before that date. The earliest work done on children's geographies can largely be traced to William Bunge's work on spatial oppression of children in Detroit and Toronto, where children are deemed as the ones who suffer the most under an oppressing adult framework of social, cultural and political forces controlling the urban-built environment. This development emerged from the realisation that previously human geography had largely ignored the everyday lives of children, who form a significant section of society, have specific needs and capacities, and may experience the world in very different ways. Thus children's geographies can in part be seen in parallel to an interest in gender in geography and feminist geography insomuch as their starting points were the gender blindness of mainstream academic geography.

Children's geographies also shares many of the underpinning principles of childhood studies, the so-called new social studies of childhood, and the sociology of the family—namely, that childhood is a social construction and that scholars should pay greater attention to children's voices and agency, although recent 'new wave' scholarship has challenged these principles (Kraftl, 2013).

Children's geographies rests on the idea that children as a social group share certain characteristics that are experientially, politically and ethically significant and worthy of study. The pluralisation in the title is intended to imply that children's lives will be markedly different in various times and places and in various circumstances such as gender, family and class. The current developments in children's geographies are attempting to link the frame of analysing it to one that requires multiple perspectives and willingness to acknowledge the 'multiplicity' of their geographies.

Children's geographies is sometimes coupled with, yet distinguished from, the geographies of childhood. The former has an interest in the everyday lives of children; the latter has an interest in how adult society conceives of the very idea of childhood and how this impinges on children's lives in many ways. This includes imaginations about the nature of children and the related spatial implications. In an early article, Holloway and Valentine termed these 'spatial discourses'.

Areas and topics of study

Children's geographies can be observed through the various lenses provided by foci (plural of focus), thus the plurality inspired by post-modern and post-structural social geographers (Panelli, 2009). These foci include, but are not limited to, the history of its emergence (key authors and texts), the nature of the child (geographical concepts, family contexts, society contexts, gender variation; aged-based variation, cultural variation); children in the environment (home, school, play, neighbourhood, street, city, country, landscapes of consumption, cyberspace); designing environments for children (children as planners, utopian visions); environmental hazards (traffic, health and environment, accidents); indirect experience of place (not medium-specific, literature, TV and cyberspace); social issues (children's fears, parent's fears for their children, poverty and deprivation, work, migration, social hazards, crime and deviance); citizenship and agency (environmental action, local politics, interest in the environment); and children's geographical knowledge (environmental cognition, understanding of the physical environment) (McKendrick, 2000).

The methodologies of researching children's worlds and the ethics of doing so have also been distinguished by the otherness of childhood.

Theoretical trends

For some years, critics argued that scholarship in children's geographies was characterised by a lack of theoretical diversity and 'block politics'. However, since the mid-2000s, the subdiscipline has seen a proliferation and diversification of theoretical work away from the social constructivist principles of childhood studies and the new social studies of childhood. A major influential trend has been the development of non-representational theory by children's geographers, especially scholars such as Peter Kraftl, John Horton, Matej Blazek, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Affrica Taylor, Pauliina Rautio and Kim Kullman. This work shares many theoretical influences with a so-called 'new wave' of childhood studies, and especially the influence of poststructural, new materialist and feminist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett (a political theorist).

For instance, in a series of articles, John Horton and Peter Kraftl have challenged a sense of 'what matters' in scholarship with children—from the material objects, emotions and affects that characterise 'participation' to the ways in which our embodied engagements with place in childhood are carried forward into adulthood, thereby scrambling any neat notion of 'transition' from childhood to adulthood. Elsewhere, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Affrica Taylor have developed new approaches to understanding the 'common worlds' of children and a range of nonhuman species, including both domestic and 'wild' animals. Their active 'common-worlds' research collective brings together a range of scholars who seek to explore how children's lives are entangled with those of nonhumans in ways that challenge oppressive, colonial and/or neoliberal views of the human as an individuated subject somehow distanced from 'nature'.

Recently, there has been vibrant debate about the political value of non-representational approaches to childhood. Some scholars argue that non-representational theories encourage a focus upon the banal, everyday, ephemeral and small-scale at the expense of understanding and critically interrogating wider-scaled and longer-standing processes of marginalisation. Others argue that, whilst valid, non-representational and 'new wave' approaches extend beyond the small-scale, offering useful and in some cases fundamental ways to critically and creatively re-think the ways of doing research with children and their 'common worlds'.

A second key conceptual trend has been in work on subjectivity, children's political geography and emotion. For instance, Louise Holt (2013) uses the work of Judith Butler to critically examine the emergence of the infant as a 'subject' through power relations that are often gendered, as well as infanthood as a stage in the course of life that is subject to particular kinds of social construction. Elsewhere, there has been a surge in interest in children's political geographies, that has to some extent been informed both by developments in non-representational theory and in theories of subjectivity. Central to this scholarship (especially in the work of Tracey Skelton, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Hakli) has been a move beyond a traditional concern with children's participation in decision-making processes to highlight the range of ways in which they may be 'political'—from 'micropolitical' engagements with ethnic or social divisions in the school or the street to critical considerations of major policy documents such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Louise Holt's work on subjectivity also connects with a wider, ongoing interest in the emotional geography of childhood and youth (Bartos, 2012, Blazek, 2013), which, although overlapping with interests in non-representational children's geographies, also has its roots in feminist theory. Such approaches informed early texts that were important to the early development of children's geographies, particularly in Sarah Holloway's work on parenting and local childcare cultures. More recently, there has been a reinvigoration of interest in the study of parenting, some of which has driven theorisations of the emotions that characterise the intimacy of parent/caregiver-child relationships—especially where these are cut across by policies designed to intervene into the spaces of parenting. This work has therefore linked together the apparently small-scale concerns of intimate family life with larger concerns such as government policy-making and school-based interventions.